Author: Derek Vincent Stern
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
ISBN: 9780900458927
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
This pioneering contribution to the economic history of medieval England focuses on the Hertfordshire demesne farm of Kinsbourne (later Herpendenbury) and questions whether the farm's periods of economic success and failure were due to human factors or to the forces of nature. Originally written as a doctoral thesis in 1978, the history has now been edited and published as a memorial to its author who died in 1993. The detailed study is based on the meticulous analysis of numerous primary sources which, the author concludes, suggest that the weather had little impact on the efficiency, or otherwise, of the manor's management, accountancy or exploitation of the market. A lengthy introduction places the work within the context of meteorological debate and regional history.
Author: Bruce M.S. Campbell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040247520
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
This is the third collection of articles by Bruce Campbell to appear in the Variorum series. Late medieval England was an overwhelmingly rural society. Never since has such a large proportion of the population lived in the countryside or relied so directly for its livelihood upon agriculture. The lot of a majority of that population was always a hard one - and never more so than during the first half of the 14th century, when peasants competed with each other for ever-scarcer land and work and a succession of major harvest failures jeopardised the survival of many. Nevertheless, experience varied considerably, both during this era of mounting population pressure and the century and more of population decline and stagnation that followed the demographic disaster of the Black Death. How well individual communities coped during these contrasting conditions of expansion and contraction owed much to the quality and composition of their natural-resource endowment, a good deal to their ability to take advantage of changing commercial opportunities, and sometimes almost everything to how exposed they were to military conflict. Always, however, much hinged upon how the twin feudal institutions of lordship and serfdom were mapped onto land and people via the manorial system. These are the themes variously explored by the eight essays assembled in this volume, which range from a case-study of a single crowded Norfolk manor to a consideration of the broad and, towards the end of the Middle Ages, widening contrasts that persisted between North and South.
Author: William Chester Jordan
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400830389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
A Tale of Two Monasteries takes an unprecedented look at one of the great rivalries of the Middle Ages and offers it as a revealing lens through which to view the intertwined histories of medieval England and France. This is the first book to systematically compare Westminster Abbey and the abbey of Saint-Denis--two of the most important ecclesiastical institutions of the thirteenth century--and to do so through the lives and competing careers of the two men who ruled them, Richard de Ware of Westminster and Mathieu de Vendôme of Saint-Denis. Esteemed historian William Jordan weaves a breathtaking narrative of the social, cultural, and political history of the period. It was an age of rebellion and crusades, of artistic and architectural innovation, of unprecedented political reform, and of frustrating international diplomacy--and Richard and Mathieu, in one way or another, played important roles in all these developments. Jordan traces their rise from obscure backgrounds to the highest ranks of political authority, Abbot Richard becoming royal treasurer of England, and Abbot Mathieu twice serving as a regent of France during the crusades. By enabling us to understand the complex relationships the abbots and their rival institutions shared with each other and with the kings and social networks that supported and exploited them, A Tale of Two Monasteries paints a vivid portrait of medieval society and politics, and of the ambitious men who influenced them so profoundly.
Author: Kathleen Pribyl
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319559532
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 309
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Book Description
This book is situated at the cross-roads of environmental, agricultural and economic history and climate science. It investigates the climatic background for the two most significant risk factors for life in the crisis-prone England of the Later Middle Ages: subsistence crisis and plague. Based on documentary data from eastern England, the late medieval growing season temperature is reconstructed and the late summer precipitation of that period indexed. Using these data, and drawing together various other regional (proxy) data and a wide variety of contemporary documentary sources, the impact of climatic variability and extremes on agriculture, society and health are assessed. Vulnerability and resilience changed over time: before the population loss in the Great Pestilence in the mid-fourteenth century meteorological factors contributing to subsistence crises were the main threat to the English people, after the arrival of Yersinia pestis it was the weather conditions that faciliated the formation of recurrent major plague outbreaks. Agriculture and harvest success in late medieval England were inextricably linked to both short term weather extremes and longer term climatic fluctuations. In this respect the climatic transition period in the Late Middle Ages (c. 1250-1450) is particularly important since the broadly favourable conditions for grain cultivation during the Medieval Climate Optimum gave way to the Little Ice Age, when agriculture was faced with many more challenges; the fourteenth century in particular was marked by high levels of climatic variability.
Author: John Hare
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
ISBN: 1902806840
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261
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Book Description
"This book seeks to explore the changing nature of English society through a case study of countryside and town in southern England during the period from c.1380 to c.1520. It explores the influence of landscape and population on the agriculture of Wiltshire, the regional patterns of arable and pastoral farming, and the growing contrast between the large-scale mixed farming of the chalklands and the family farms of the claylands. It examines the changing situation of the rural tenant population as it reacted to the greater opportunities available in the land-market. During this period, Wiltshire became one of the great cloth-producing counties of England (as reflected in its rising taxable wealth). Such economic expansion generated jobs both within the industry and beyond, stimulating the market for food, services and manufactured goods. Salisbury was one of the greatest cities in the kingdom, and below this was a hierarchy of interesting lesser towns. But such growth generated its own problems: more and more people became dependent on the cloth trade and particularly on exporting cloth; if exports fell, as during the mid-fifteenth-century crisis, they suffered. As scholars are increasingly aware, the later Middle Ages was a period of considerable change, and this study contributes to debates about the nature of both change and continuity at a national level. It will also be of value to local historians interested in one of the most important periods in Wiltshire's history."--BLACKWELL'S.
Author: Bruce M.S. Campbell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000948374
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 359
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Book Description
Until recently, historians tended to stress the perceived technological and ecological shortcomings of medieval agriculture. The ten essays assembled in this volume offer a contrary view. Based upon close documentary analysis of the demesne farms managed for and by lords, they show that, by 1300, in the most commercialized parts of England, production decisions were based upon relative factor costs and commodity prices. Moreover, when and where economic conditions were ripe and environmental and institutional circumstances favourable, medieval cultivators successfully secured high and ecologically sustainable levels of land productivity. They achieved this by integrating crop and livestock production into the sort of manure-intensive systems of mixed-husbandry which later underpinned the more celebrated output growth of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If medieval agriculture failed to fulfill the production potential provided by wider adoption of such systems, this is more appropriately explained by the want of the kind of market incentives that might have justified investment, innovation, and specialization on the scale that characterized the so-called 'agricultural revolution', than either the lack of appropriate agricultural technology or the innate 'backwardness' of medieval cultivators.
Author: Shani D'Cruze
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
ISBN: 9781902806730
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
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Book Description
Based on extensive primary-source research, this historical account considers the changing identity of 18th-century Colchester from the perspective of its "middling sort"--a section of society often attached to cultures of politeness and to the practices of consumption and production that helped shape economic change. Painstakingly reconstructing 18th-century social networks along lines of family, kinship, gender, spatiality, religion, and politics, this study examines the relationships between individual and family biographies while reflecting on provincial urban society and culture. The guide explores how Colchester capitalized on growth in agriculturally based industries--such as brewing, milling, and malting--and its role as an east-coast port and its participating in the urban renaissance and commodification of polite culture.
Author: Alan Fox
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
ISBN: 1907396365
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
A traveller through the length and breadth of England is soon aware of cultural differences, some of which are clearly visible in the landscape. The eminent English historian Charles Phythian-Adams has put forth that England, through much of the last millennium, could be divided into regional societies, which broadly coincided with groups of pre-1974 counties. These shire assemblages in turn lay largely within the major river drainage systems of the country. In this unusual study Alan Fox tests for, and establishes, the presence of an informal frontier between two of the proposed societies astride the Leicestershire-Lincolnshire border, which lies on the watershed between the Trent and Witham drainage basins. The evidence presented suggests a strong case for a cultural frontier zone, which is announced by a largely empty landscape astride the border between the contrasting settlement patterns of these neighbouring counties.
Author: Celia Cordle
Publisher: Univ of Hertfordshire Press
ISBN: 1907396268
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
"Out of the Hay and into the Hops explores the history and development of hop cultivation in the Weald of Kent together with the marketing of this important crop in the Borough at Southwark (where a significant proportion of Wealden hops were sold). A picture emerges of the relationship between the two activities, as well as of the impact this rural industry had upon the lives of the people engaged in it. Dr Cordle draws extensively on personal accounts of hop work to evoke a way of life now lost for good. Oral history, together with evidence from farm books and other sources, records how the steady routine of hop ploughing and dung spreading, weeding and spraying contrasted with the bustle and excitement of hop picking (bringing in, as it did, many itinerant workers from outside the community to help with the harvest) and the anxious period of drying the crop. For hops, prey to the vagaries of weather and disease, needed much care and attention to bring them to fruition. In early times their cultivation provided work for more people than any other crop. The diverse processes of hop cultivation are examined within the wider context of events such as the advent of rail and the effects of war, as are changes to the working practices and technologies used, and their reception and implementation in the Weald. Meanwhile, in the Borough, an enclave of hop factors and merchants, whose interests sometimes conflicted with those of the hop growers, arose and then suffered decline. A full account of this trade is presented, including day-to-day working practices, links with the Weald, and the changes in hop marketing following Britain's entry into the European Economic Community. This book provides readers with a fascinating analysis of some three hundred years of hop history in the Weald and the Borough. Hops still grow in the Weald; in the Borough, the Le May facade and the gates of the Hop Exchange are reminders of former trade."--Book description.
Author: Edward Miller
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521200745
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 1036
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Book Description
The third volume of The Agrarian History of England and Wales, which was first published in 1991, deals with the last century and a half of the Middle Ages. It concerns itself with the new demographic and economic circumstances created in large measure by endemic plague.
